About

​The 80’s

Reinventing Painting in a Decade of Change

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A time of energy, irony, and invention - the 1980s saw painting return with new confidence and complexity. Rob Scholte, Gerhard Naschberger, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, and Andreas Schulze each shaped this moment in their own way. Their works reflect a shared fascination with images and the freedom to question, reimagine, and play.

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About the Artists

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ROB SCHOLTE

Born in Amsterdam in 1958, Rob Scholte is known for his incisive use of appropriation and quotation. His practice draws from advertising, popular culture, and art history, transforming familiar imagery into new visual contexts that challenge ideas of originality and authorship. Emerging in the vibrant 1980s scene, Scholte became one of the key figures of the Dutch avant-garde, participating in major international exhibitions including documenta 8 in Kassel. His works often oscillate between irony and critique, reflecting a fascination with the circulation of images in modern media culture. Through re-use and repetition, Scholte exposes how visual meaning is constructed - and endlessly re-constructed - in contemporary life.

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GERHARD NASCHBERGER

Gerhard Naschberger (1955 – 2014) was an Austrian painter whose work epitomized the expressive spirit of the 1980s.

A member of the Cologne-based group Mülheimer Freiheit, he helped define the Neo-Expressionist movement known as the Neue Wilde. Naschberger’s paintings merge figuration and abstraction, weaving together art-historical symbols, fragments of mythology, and the spontaneity of the painter’s gesture. His canvases reveal a layered world in which image and emotion intertwine, constantly shifting between clarity and dissolution. Both intuitive and intellectual, his art captured the restless search for identity and meaning that marked his generation.

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JIŘÍ GEORG DOKOUPIL 

Born in Krnov, former Czechoslovakia, in 1954, Jiří Georg Dokoupil has built an oeuvre defined by constant reinvention. A founding member of Mülheimer Freiheit, he refused to settle on a single style or medium, instead creating hundreds of series using soap bubbles, soot, rubber tyres, or candle smoke. His experimental approach turns painting into a laboratory of ideas, where process and concept hold equal weight. Dokoupil’s art is at once playful and analytical, dismantling expectations of what painting should be. Through material curiosity and poetic transformation, he opened a path for a new kind of freedom in postmodern image-making.

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ANDREAS SCHULZE

Andreas Schulze, born in Hannover in 1955, developed a highly personal visual language that blends humor, abstraction, and the everyday. While associated with the 1980s return to painting, his work diverged from pure expressionism toward a subtle, constructed world of interiors, furniture, and stylized objects. Schulze transforms the banal into the fantastical, creating immersive environments where paintings, installations, and found objects coexist. His compositions radiate both calm and absurdity - domestic yet uncanny, playful yet precise. Through these shifting atmospheres, Schulze explores the poetry of form and the quiet strangeness of modern life.

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